In 1728, twelve-year-old James Annesley vanishes from the streets of Dublin, sold into indentured servitude in America by an uncle who wants his inheritance. Historian Dan Cruickshank follows the case from the docks of Ireland to the plantations of the American colonies and back to the courtrooms of London, where Annesley eventually returns to fight for his identity and his fortune. The film uses the case, which later helped inspire Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped, to open up a wider picture of Georgian Britain's aristocracy and its dependence on trafficking and forced labor, showing how a legal system built to protect property could just as easily be used to erase a person. Cruickshank visits period locations and draws on court records and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the journey. The result is less a rags-to-riches story than a look at how casually the eighteenth century's polished drawing rooms sat alongside kidnapping, indenture, and the sale of children.